


"Boss, we have a new immortal."

by AndromedaofOthys



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy knows Thor and Loki and wants nothing to do with them, Bisexual Nile Freeman, Determined Nile Freeman, F/F, Hacker Nile Freeman, Immortality Shenanigans, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani and Nicky | Nicolo di Genoa Are In Love, Loki is a Theatre Kid (Marvel), M/M, Magic and Science, Malta (place), Mentioned James Copley, Multi, Nick Fury is so done, POV Nile Freeman, Sweet Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genoa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25496227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndromedaofOthys/pseuds/AndromedaofOthys
Summary: The gang, still feeling the emptiness Booker left behind, decided to finally take a break on Malta, where Joe and Nicky have a castle (it's a fortification, Nile!). However, the dreams reveal the existence of new immortals..."Their names are Loki and Thor -""Oh hell no. I'mnotdeal with that spoiled man-child and his theatre kid of a brother again!"
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 9
Kudos: 139





	"Boss, we have a new immortal."

Three months after the revelation she was not exactly as mortal as she thought she was, Nile was sitting in front of the computer screen and playing desk monkey job of checking for all and any pictures and video evidence of the existence of their tiny band of near-immortals. It was a boring slog, but nothing she hadn’t experienced before; heck, compared to what constituted as slog work in Marines, this was a joy-filled job.

The only problem was -

“Hey kiddo, you’ve been at the screen for the past eighteen hours,” Joe appeared on the other side of the table, his big, dark eyes staring into Nile’s dry ones. Nile blinked, a little taken aback at the genuine care in the former soldier’s voice, and felt how dry and stinging her eyes were and how heavy her eyelids were.

Huh, she really has been at this for over eighteen hours, had she?

“You should take a break, rest your eyes,” Joe gave her her own water thermos bottle, now full of water (Nile forgot at which point it had run dry). “And drink. It’s only May, but Malta’s weather is never overly kind to foreigners.”

The gang of four were currently squatting in Malta, in a surprisingly nice castle ( _fortification,_ Nickey had corrected her with a subtle roll of his eyes and smile, _fortification, Nile. I forget how time makes language drop certain words and concepts._ Nile at the time had just stuck her tongue out, but after a few days, she had to agree that the place was definitely a _fortification_ , made only for war, and not for lavish living of aristocracy) that Joe and Nicky acquired sometime in the 16th – 17th century and kept as a resort of sorts. They still refused to say exactly _how_ they got it, and Andy also had no idea (apparently, they and she had separated for a century or so after Quynh’s sinking, and they had no idea what the others were doing), but the giggles whenever the subject was brought up was anything to go by, it was an amusing story.

Nile swore she’d one day get it out of the two lovebirds.

That day was not today, however, and Nile accepted the thermos, guzzled the water down and shifted from the desk to the cot she had claimed as her own, in the spot with the least draft and the best – even though it was still a bit sketchy – WiFi signal.

“Don’t let Andy muddle around with it,” Nile pointed a serious finger at Joe as she crawled under the covers. “I’m this close to tracking down the origin of that leak, but one wrong move and I’ll have to start _all over again_.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Joe playfully and sloppily saluted her, and Nile snorted, closing her eyes and forcing herself to fall down into the endless quiet and darkness.

_When she opened her eyes, Nile had to double check if she wasn’t hallucinating. This place… it was somewhere in Europe, that was for sure. States had this sort of architecture in some places, but after three months of crisscrossing Europe, she quickly learned how cheap knock-off and out of place those building looked in the States. It was a huge hall of sorts, done in a baroque – no, neo baroque style – it wasn’t as opulent and over the top, but the traces of it were there. Everything was done in pristine whites and creams of what looked like marble, but Nile couldn’t eyeball it for sure._

_Also, the place was completely unfamiliar – she had never been here before, Nile was sure._

_Was she dreamwalking? Or… was she seeing a birth of a new immortal? Andy did mention they dreamed of her…_

_A sound of screams tugged her out of trying to pin down how she got there and where exactly she was, and returned to the plaza in front of the hall – which was suddenly filled with screaming people in outrageously nice dresses and suits slowly kneeling down to… a nicely dressed guy holding a glowing stick?_

_A staff, Nile concluded after a few seconds of analyzing the shape. Nasty weapon to both use and be on business end of – Andy had shown her a few tricks with it, and oh boy was it far more complicated than what Hollywood would let you believe -_

_Holy shit, were those **horns** on the guy’s helmet?? Where the fuck did the helmet come from??_

_The guy was talking something that Nile could not understand – wait, he said ‘unter’. Was this Germany? That’ll make tracking this down a little easier._

_ Suddenly an old man stood up, spat something back at the Horns-and-Staff guy, and the guy fired a  **bolt of light** at the old man, what the actual fuck -! _

_The last thing Nile saw before she was violently tugged out of the dream was the round red and white shield with a star on it that was strangely familiar…_

“- kid, you okay?”

Nile gasped, propping herself on the elbows as she fought for the next inhale, as the Joe watched her  with a worried look.

“You okay?” he repeated the question, handing her a towel to wipe away the sweat on her face.

“Yeah, I’m okay, I just had a weird dream,” Nile nodded after a few seconds, playing with the towel after she wiped the sweat away. “It was… weird. Really weird.”

“Immortal dream?” Joe asked sharply, and Nile’s cot gave an groan as Joe relocated from his chair to sit at Nile’s feet, eyes fixed on hers. “You’ve seen a birth of new immortal?”

“I… I think so,” Nile took a deep breath to get rid of the last breathless hitches in her voice. “It was nothing like a nightmare, more like a lucid dream of a place and people I’ve never met.”

“Immortal dream,” Joe nodded as if he heard exactly what he had expected out of her. “Come on, we need to talk this over with Andy.”

Nile carefully got from under the covers,  bound her hair away from her face to make it seem less of a bushy mess , and padded after Joe down the newly dusted stone steps from one of the towers to the kitchen area – according to Nicky, it had once been armory, but with the end of the wars, it was mostly emptied and weapons relocated to other places, so the room was turned into a dining/cooking area.

A ndy and Nicky were lounging in the sofas there, watching some sort of car show – not the racing one, but car repairing one. Andy claimed it was for honing their knowledge on the car mechanics, but Nile suspected it was due to one of the regular mechanics being an unfairly hot woman. Subtlety, thy name was not Andy.

“Hey,” Joe kissed Nicky on the cheek as he grabbed a controller from his soulmate’s hand and muted the show. “Kid dreamed one of us appearing.”

Andy sat up straight in her sofa, and Nicky’s shoulders tensed up.

“C’mere, Nile,” Andy motioned Nile over to the third sofa, a little out of the ways. “Drag it over and start talking. Every detail is important, okay?”

Nile nodded, dragged the sofa and told them everything – the staff, weird horns on the helmet, German-sounding language, the neo-baroque hall, the old man.

“So, German, fancy ball in a neo-baroque hall,” Andy frowned. “That’ll narrow things a lot, but there are three different countries with German as official languages, and Dutch and Danish also sound vaguely like German to untrained ear.”

Nile winced – she made the rough guess, but she didn’t know how much space they’d have to cover…

Wait.

“Wait, there was a street name there!” Nile jumped up from the seat and ran up to her room, Andy, Nicky and Joe following in her wake.

“A street name?” Nicky said as they all congregated around Nile’s laptop. “Can you pronounce it?”

“No chance in hell,” Nile shook her head as she typed in the name into the search bar. “It had those dots over o and a weird symbol that looks like b but not really b...”

“Königstraße,” Andy leaned over to see what Nile typed in and pronounced it flawlessly, with sinking ‘o’, ‘h’ instead of ‘g’ and sharp ‘s’ instead of that weird ‘b’-lookalike. “King’s Street. It shouldn’t be that common of a street name.”

“Düsseldorf, Nürnberg, Duisburg, Stuttgart,” Joe listed off the cities the search threw out. “Those cities are relatively close, but in pairs: Stuttgart and Nürnberg, and Düsseldorf and Duisburg.”

“My money’s on either Düsseldorf or Stuttgart,” Andy frowned. “So we need to split up, huh?”

“It would be the best idea,” Joe nodded. Nile and Nicky looked at Andy, who after a few moments nodded.

“Let’s move out, people!”

* * *

Nile ended up on the team with Andy going to Stuttgart. Nicky and Joe took a plane to Barcelona and then overlay to D ü sseldorf, while Andy and Nile took plane to Rome and then overlay to Stuttgart. It was partly to confuse anyone who would follow them, and partly to accommodate the planes Copley, the rat bastard that he was, had secured them in Rome and Barcelona.

“Trying to see where they are right now?” Nile asked, noticing Andy trying to doze off.

“Yeah,” Andy bit her lip. “I didn’t want to say it with Joe and Nicky around, but your description of that man… I’m honestly hoping to the any higher power that exists that it’s not _him._ ”

“Him?” Nile blinked. “The Horns-and-Staff guy?”

“M-hmm,” Andy hummed, shifting to find a better position to fall asleep in. “If it’s him or his prick of a brother, we’re calling this off. I don’t wanna deal with their holier than thou asses.”

“Oh yikes,” Nile winced and also settled down to a better position to sleep in. They were alone in the plane, and the doors to the cockpit were closed to allow for total privacy.

With the almost hour of flight between Rome and Stuttgart, they didn’t have a lot of time to dream. Thankfully, Nile had remembered to take the  heavy duty  sleep pills from Malta  and had experimented before with them to figure out just how many would it take to make her drop to sleep quickly, and how many to kill her, no matter how temporarily.

Pulling out the small baggy with the pills, she tossed it at Andy, who looked at the pills curiously.

“Exactly six, dry or wet, doesn’t matter, but please don’t take them with liquor, I haven’t tested that scenario yet,” Nile instructed her briskly, pulling out another baggy and shaking out six pills onto her hand. “Should put you quicker to sleep, but still not send you straight over the death line.”

“Huh, experimenting? When did you have time for that?” Andy’s eyebrows rose, but followed Nile’s instructions to the letter, swallowing the pills dry just like Nile.

“In Amsterdam,” Nile answered readily. “You left me behind, so I had to do _something_.”

T he Amsterdam mission ended being a bit of a drag for Nile: since it mostly consisted of Andy, Nicky and Joe cleaning up after their own contacts, Nile ended up chilling in the only slightly rundown house a stone’s throw away from the glitzy and squeaky-clean city cente r of Amsterdam.

Pro tip for finding the squatting places in the big cities – go behind the nice buildings near the center, and you’ll find a lot of surprisingly decent spaces.

That aside, with the lack of things to do and her unwillingness to show her face just yet after the whole Merrick thing, she ended up killing herself eleven times before figuring out the exact dosages for three different brands of sleeping pills. Normally a horrifying thought, now it just helped her mind get used to the state of quasi-immortality she will now be living.

The darkness and weight crept up on her cornea and on top of her eyelids, and Nile let herself drop completely into another dream, seeking more information about the new immortal.

_Nile was no longer in the dark plaza in Germany: she was now standing in what looked like a high-tech SWAT room, one worthy of spy agencies like CIA or FBI or NSA – all glass, chrome and steel, and fancy video walls and projectors._

… _wait, did that table logo say motherfucking **SHIELD** on it?? Oh hell, this was bad. Worse than bad. Even as a Marine, the stories about the insane organization that lived even deeper in the shadows was a well known fact. To other branches of the Army, it might’ve just been a myth, a campfire story, but to her, they were a living nightmare she would never want to get in the crosshairs of._

_The company sitting at the table with the SHIELD logo on were a bit of a weird bunch. She spotted two women dressed in a typical spy-black attire, with one wearing significantly more knives and spandex than what should be legally allowed – she was really, really hot – okay, she should stop feasting on a female eye-candy and go inspect the male eye-candy._

_The two blondes were definitely gym rats – faces like white Ken dolls, and body buffed to the point it was just ridiculous. They also had pretty weird attire: the blonde with long, shaggy hair had a goddamn hammer resting on the side of his chair, while the other… was wearing Captain America spandex? The original, vintage shit?_

“ _What the actual fuck,” Nile shook her head and focused on the last guy in the room – the sorta-Indian looking guy, all nerves and curly hair. Pretty cute, as far as Nile was concerned, in a Joe-sort of way – soft and shy and nerdy, but with an edge hidden underneath._

_She wondered what kind of edge this guy hid under those nervous ticks._

_She could not properly hear what was being discussed – apparently sleep pills did have a drawback, it dulled your senses in the dreams – but she could not miss Tony Stark swaggering his way into the room and immediately having a nice rapport with the nervous guy. God, Nile wished she had learned to lip-read; but then again, she now had time, she’ll do it one way or another._

_Besides, with Stark, there were only two things that could get him so animated – science and women, and the nerdy guy did seem to be behaving like a typical science bro._

_And then… the eyepatch guy walked in, and suddenly Nile was able to hear things._

“ _\- only here to track down the cube,” the eyepatch guy was saying to Stark. “I was hoping you might join him.”_

“ _Let’s start with that stick of his,” the Captain America copy interjected. Stick? Did they mean the staff? “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.”_

_Hydra? What was a Hydra? Magic? Cube? More hacking for Copley and Nile, it looked like. She had info gaps, and it annoyed her to no end. She wanted to be in on the convo, dammit!_

“ _I don’t know about that, but it’s powered by the cube,” the eyepatch dude – who also had an awesome trench coat, Nile would ten out of ten steal it and never take it off – frowned at the assembled people. “And I’d like to know how Loki used it to turn two of the sharpest men I know into his personal flying monkeys.”_

_Ooof, that was an info dump she didn’t expect. So, their immortal’s name was presumably Loki (it was familiar to Nile, but she couldn’t right now put her finger on how and why it was so familiar), and had used the staff to brainwash people… and the eyepatch dude used the Wizard of Oz reference?_

_She was liking this eyepatch dude more and more. Creepy superspy or not, he had style and swag, and Nile could get behind that._

“ _Monkeys? I do not understand,” the shaggy-hair Ken doll gym rat spoke up for the first time, looking very, very lost, and Nile snorted. Where had this dude crawled out from, under a fucking rock?_

“ _I do! I understand that reference,” the Captain America copy jumped up, looking all proud of himself._

“ _Yeah, you and everyone born in the last fifty years, man,” Nile shook her head, feeling the dream slowly fade at the edges. Welp, she didn’t get much info about the location except the fact their immortal – Loki – was definitely no longer in Germany. That was a big yikes, but she and Copley could still salvage the situation._

_Suddenly, the shaggy Ken doll guy looked from the retreating Stark and nervous guy straight to her, and tilted his head._

“ _Who are you, dream spy? Show yourself!”_

“ _Whu – You can hear me?!”Nile blurted out, eyes blown out wide. What the hell?_

“ _Spy?” The eyepatch, the two women and the copy all looked around._

“ _My perception of magic is paltry in comparison to my brother Loki, but I can still sense your presence well enough,” the Ken doll shrugged, a motion so radically at odds with the formal speech he was using, Nile nearly got a whiplash. “You have nothing to fear if you merely stumbled here by mistake – so please come out.”_

_Before Nile could do or say anything, she felt the unmistakable pull upwards – the pills stopped working, and she was waking up._

“ _I can’t, buff Ken doll, my sleeping pills stopped working!” Nile shouted, words tumbling over her lips with the speed that would not make her sound out of place in a rap diss battle. “Listen, we can only track you and your brother through the dreams – where are you?”_

“ _Buff Ken do-”_

* * *

“ _-_ doll? _”_ Thor finished with resignation, as he sensed the foreign presence evaporate completely out of his senses. If Loki were here, he would’ve probably known how to extend her time allotted for the dream just enough to get all relevant information.

“Thor what was that? What spy?” Nick the man of Furies demanded to know, and Thor sighed. Loki would know how to explain better, but Thor would try his best.

“There are many ways _seidr_ manifests, one of them being dreamwalking,” Thor hung his head down. “It was mostly used for spying in the past, but this person seems to be very young and untrained, so it must’ve been a mistake.”

“How do you know that?” Friend Steven relaxed a little from the alert state, which put Thor at ease. He did not expect Midgard to be open to the concept of magic, but his friends did seem to push the boundaries with only curiosity in their eyes.

“Their voice – they’re young,” Thor ticked off the signs. “The words they use are something I’ve heard Lady Darcy say, and she is very in tune with the modern speech. They also mentioned sleeping inducers – any trained mage worth their salt would be able to hypnotize themselves into dreamwalking with no issue.”

“Sleeping indu – sleeping pills?” Lady Natasha questioned, also relaxing.

“Are those not the same things?” Thor asked, slightly worried. He still mixed up concepts on occasion, despite Lady Jane and Lady Darcy’s best efforts…

“Yes they are, it’s just been a while since someone said it that way,” Friend Steven grinned reassuringly. “I got you though, so it’s all fine. Thank you for alerting us.”

“You’re welcome!” Thor grinned back. Things were finally looking up – the only thing needed was from friends Banner and Stark to find the Tesseract, and things would be perfect.

Well, as perfect as it could be without going on a date with Lady Jane, but Thor had learned how to pick his battles, and be happy with partial goals.


End file.
